Genocide in Iraq and Obama’s Reluctant Intervention

Obama is a president who is very reluctant to go to war even for a humanitarian intervention. Obama is cerebral. He admires ex-President Bush (the father), an adept realist in foreign policy, who calculated, in contrast with the son, that it was not in the national interest of America to take the final steps in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War in 1991. This was the case even though the dictator had committed genocide against the Shiites and the Kurds, who had rebelled with the encouragement of Washington.

Obama was dragged into engagement and now jets take off from aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, in the Persian Gulf, to bomb extremist positions of the Islamic State. Hours before the announcement about engagement in northern Iraq to, among other things, avoid a massacre of religious minorities such as the Christians and the Yazidis in a blitz of jihadi barbarism, Frank Wolf, a respected Republican congressman who plans to retire after 34 years in Congress, wrote an open letter to Obama: “Much like President Clinton has deeply regretted his failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I believe you will come to regret your inaction for years to come. You will come to sincerely regret your failure to take action to stop the genocide in Iraq.”

Obama is acting — but, as I said, with reluctance, and insisting that the intervention is limited. And in fact, the principal factor is not humanitarian. The government believes it is in its national interest to prevent the diplomats and American military accessories posted in Erbil, in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, from being threatened by the onslaught of the Islamic State. Giving assistance to the Kurds, a rare success story in the Middle East, is also in the strategic interest of America. The Kurds are allies of the United States. They should not be betrayed.

And we must not forget the usual suspect: petroleum. With 1.5 million inhabitants (the population now filled with refugees), Erbil is the capital of the regional Kurdish government and the administrative center of its petroleum industry (an autonomous region representing one-fourth of the production of Iraqi petroleum). The Iraqi Kurds say that they would have the world’s ninth largest oil reserves if they had an independent country. These oil wells operate near Erbil.

Strategically, given Obama’s reluctance to intervene for humanitarian ends, even a limited operation would have unpredictable consequences, and there exists an Iraq syndrome which immobilizes the United States. And little more than 10 years after the Iraq invasion, it is still appropriate to speak of the abominable legacy of George W. Bush.

Obama prefers to outsource military actions, as was the case in the fateful intervention in Libya, calling on the Europeans, or the overuse of drones or unmanned aircraft. One concrete fact, however, is that Obama is returning to Iraq, a scenario in which the Americans, under Bush, entered in a disastrous way in 2003, and in which it left there in an equally disastrous manner in 2011.

The president will do everything possible to avoid deepening the engagement in 2014. If it is necessary, he will simply win the hearts and minds of the Americans, tired of war, by proclaiming that the Islamic State represents a direct threat to the interests of the United States and not merely to martyred religious minorities and ethics in Iraq.